


Forgotten How To Start A Fire

by badwips



Category: True Detective
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Pre-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-08
Updated: 2014-04-08
Packaged: 2018-01-18 01:33:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 612
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1410073
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/badwips/pseuds/badwips
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Leaving North Shore in 1993, chasing storms and letting them chase you.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Forgotten How To Start A Fire

**Author's Note:**

  * For [laliquey](https://archiveofourown.org/users/laliquey/gifts).



_Clear the mind.  Picture yourself in a white room._

The room is white already, the men in it are white, swathed in white. All but one, speaking, dressed in blue.

Colors meant to be innocuous still vibrate behind his eyes.

_Picture yourself alone. Stretch out your limbs, you can’t touch the walls. The space around you goes on forever. There’s no ground. You are weightless. Breathe deeply, in. Isn’t it all so peaceful? So perfect? Breathe deeply, out._

His chair is near the window, angled to look at the rugged landscape, meant to soothe. It sets him back into the past which is something else to give up. Beyond the trees, he can see it starting, he can imagine it, far off he’ll find it. A burgeoning interest, a way to fill the time. Filling every moment sets the mind on the right path. Wipe it all clean. They are proud of him for following, they feel he’s ready. He’s given enough.

They tell him to stop and he gives and gives until they tell him to stop.

When he wonders what is more frightening, a hundred separate circumstances line up to be counted. Each one converges in a white room, a series of white rooms, emptying until he is alone. White rooms follow him. He covers the walls with maps, following routes in pen, taping paper together to create a work that dwarfs him. Thick lines, charcoal. Ashes.

The room is smaller. He leaves it behind.

Listen for rumors, the right channels. Keep looking up. Following helps distinguish the unshakeable unreality of his mind from what others know as fact, that’s the only reason he would want to occupy the same space as these people. They don’t look to the horizon and see a supernova, the destructive surface of another planet. What they see still horrifies them and draws them near and that’s enough.

Broken sixties music shifting through to screeching voices, overexcited men and women who have never seen anything like this, or worse, in their lives.

An addiction just as any other, not that he really needs anything to enhance the experience, he does this to strip that need away; replacement therapy.

He needs that point of osmosis, when he can feel his tires as a part of him almost ripped open by the asphalt and his veins and nerve endings let loose, thrumming, crackling like the sky, a god’s anger, and it’s all over one hundred miles an hour, too fast for him to think.

Empty white noise on the radio, fading from screams.

Too close, looking up into it as it becomes death.

An arcing explosion of crashing grey and purple and deep black; pictures of space in unpreserved textbooks in Alaska. The difference in endless grey, solid and unmoving, safe, and endless grey bearing down with a life to take yours.

He can turn the F-250 on a dime and lock eyes on the raging heart in the mirror. Hope comes as an electric glow. It’s not cowardice to run, some call it cowardice to get as close as he does but fuck those people who can’t face it. Come close to death and deny it. Deny it a little longer. Castle your king in the game. Throw time off your scent.

He opens his lungs and all the tar comes out of them, his voice torn out to join the static.

Others around him disperse, a spooked herd.

The maelstrom quiets.

Bartender starts to make conversation with relief, that their numbers were surely up and they were lucky to miss it.

Watching the swirl of foam dissipating in his beer, Rust nods, saying, "some luck."


End file.
